Part 7 (1/2)

”And if salvation can only be bought with pain, father? If all this suffering was the price of redemption for our sins?”

”Jew!” my father snapped at me with glittering eyes, his mouth drawn disdainfully in unutterable contempt! ”Jew! where did you learn this bartering morality? Buy! Buy! everything can be bought! If you are but willing to pay, you can go anywhere, even to heaven. Salvation can be bought for a slaughtered human being. A fixed price and dirt cheap! - Salvation for all mankind for the corpse of a single Jew. What a bargain! and G.o.d is Shylock, be holds to his bond! his bond! Blood is the fixed price, nothing can change that. If not the blood of sinners then let it be the blood of my son. Thus reads the contract:

'My bond! My bond!

My deeds upon my head! I crave the law!

The penalty and forfeit of my bond!'

”Do you know, Vico, why the Jews are hated so everywhere? It is instinctive resentment because the world feels that it has been infected with the Jewish poison. The priesthood, the black vermin, is a Jewish Germanic b.a.s.t.a.r.d brood. They have made a Jew of G.o.d himself and they will make one of you too. And that my son! my child, the heir!”

The suffering on my father's face was terrible to see. Tears began to flow from his fixed eyes.

I tried to calm him. ”Do come about, father! - it's over time!”

”We'll go on a while yet,” he said with a ghastly affected airiness, and I sat there with the blood freezing in my veins, fearing he was going mad. All at once he burst out again.

”The blood of his son! the blood of his son! to buy off sin with which he himself had burdened us - his own debts thrust on us and accepted by us against our will and pleasure, and this acceptance paid for with the blood of his own child. What a Jew! What a sly, heartless usurer! Did you make these debts, Vico? - value received? What did you get for it?

What did you get for this hereditary sin? Hereditary sin! Ha! ha! ha!

hereditary sin! what an invention! - Hereditary debt! What a crafty, bartering Jew one must be to invent such an idea.”

Once more I made an attempt, and standing upright at the mast I cried vigorously:

”Come about, father! - about!”

But he called back with even greater vehemence:

”Go ahead, I tell you!”

And then whilst I looked about over the sea and considered what to do:

”I tell you, Vico, there is life and there is death. And we must live as long as we can. But it must be real life too. Death is no life. The life of most men is a slow miserable death. There is no honor and no merit in maintaining a life that should more truly be called death. A bloodless, enervated, foul, rotten life. It is a shame that men do not yet know how to live, and even greater shame that they know still less how to die. I wanted to have you live. But I did not succeed and now I shall teach you to die. - Are you afraid?”

Then something began to stir and rise up in my soul, like a snake goaded forth from her cavern. I, too, began to forget the wind and the waves about me. True, I felt a tingling down my back to my very finger tips. Yet I was not a coward and I spoke firmly:

”I am not afraid, father. I believe I shall know quite as well as you how to die if it should be necessary, even without your teaching me.

But I won't be murdered, not even by my father.”

The tears from the fixed, now red-rimmed eyes began to flow more abundantly.

”Vico!” he cried in a much softer, trembling voice: ”Will you be true to me then? Will you let yourself be saved? Will you save your precious life and your reason? Will you abjure this accursed harpy? Will you escape the sinister band?”

But I was irritated and excited and proudly replied: ”I shall save myself, I shall be true to whomever I find worthy. I do not respect the man that curses my mother.”

Then his face changed horribly, he lifted up his trembling right hand, thereby awkwardly knocking off the canvas cap from his head so that the damp gray hair fluttered. He made Jesus' sign of doom in Michel Angelo's last judgment, screaming loudly meanwhile:

”Then I curse you, do you hear! I curse you, Lodovico Muralto. Your father curses you!”

I had enough of Old Testament sentiments left in me not to be indifferent to such an imprecation!